[stephen_g]

I got handed down some of these from somebody in grade three or four at school (I think they had belonged to one of my teacher's sons and since she knew I was into computers, she gave them to my mum for me to have). This was around 1999-2000 kind of time so they were a bit out of date, but it was a good learning experience trying to port some of the programs into QBasic!

I was fascinated with these and read them many times cover to cover over the years. Practical Things to Do with your Microcomputer was always my favourite, as well as the robotics one. I also found the machine code one interesting but never really grasped it until later.

I think the ideas in them (as well as some other computer books and magazines I had) really helped steer my interests from just being interested in computers and software to being more interested in hardware and embedded systems, which is where I work today. These were very important in hindsight in shaping my interests!